


State of Grace

by katsu



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Grief/Mourning, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:08:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27781273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katsu/pseuds/katsu
Summary: After the self-immolation that catalyzes the Season of the Hunt, the phoenix must find a new way of living.
Relationships: Osiris/Saint-14 (Destiny)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 72





	State of Grace

**Author's Note:**

  * For [zeteram](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zeteram/gifts).



> Happy birthday, Zeteram.
> 
> My apologies for the POV; some stories just insist on being told in certain ways. 
> 
> This was written at the very beginning of Season of the Hunt. I suppose that means spoilers, technically speaking. But also that means I have no idea what actually happens in the story, so this will no doubt be completely inaccurate within a month. Also, apologies in advance for any lore screw-ups. I did my best to research, but mistakes are inevitable.

**I** **.**

Rage is as easy as falling.

Oh, how she would mock you now, call you an idiot. Because she always knew that your rationality was a veneer floating on the tides of much deeper feelings. Your calm assessment of situations, your cool dance with death though the glass halls of the Infinite Forest were a lie you told yourself to make the insurmountable merely annoying.

The worst lies are those you come to believe, yourself. When a man smugly sits on the pedestal of his own legend, it is only a matter of time before he is cast down from it.

And the fall.

The sudden stop.

The shatter at the end.

There should be no room for denial, because some truths are too plain and painful to be denied. But to run is another kind of denial. To move through the Halls of Wisdom silently, to stalk prey, to kill thrall and acolytes with one silenced, perfect shot. An illusion of control and normalcy, in which you can almost recite Sagira’s litany of complaint in the back of your mind: you’ve made a mess of things again, Osiris; you’re doing something really foolish, Osiris; you’re out of your depth, Osiris.

Because the entire point of those words, of her fond, mocking despair and more than occasional, real annoyance, was that you were never truly out of your depth—all right, except for that one time, back in the Forest—because you had her. And this thing you stalk has taken her from her, and

You

Will

End

It.

You feel the hot breath of a great beast ruffling the feathers of your helmet and dodge behind a pillar, breathing the dust and earthen must and blood-scent of the Hive. You lean on other skills you learned as a warlock to, for a moment, become unseen as air.

The beast, the Celebrant, moves on. Its sword hums a discordant note that shivers down your soul, this thing that already almost killed you once.

And now, you fool, you idiot, you’ve thrown yourself against it again, so lessened.

Your denial is not at her death. You can never un-feel that raw, bleeding wound in your heart. Your denial is your refusal to let go of the game that you and Sagira played until it became its own sort of reality, the game in which you are an invulnerable legend and not a man.

You slip from behind the pillar and follow the faintly glowing footsteps of the beast, careful to leave no mark of your own. A Hive worm slithers over your foot, and you clench your jaw. It is only that slight hesitation of your forward motion that saves you. It gives your eye a different angle, lets you hear over your briefly held breath the creak of chitin and the scrape of metal on stone.

It waits for you. This is still a trap, one you almost walked into again. There is some part in the remaining, ragged shreds of your soul, that howls and gnashes its teeth and demands to charge into this final confrontation. A voice that is not a voice at the back of your mind that urges _yes, this is the way of all things, consume or be consumed_.

All it would take is one step to fall again. And it is so, so tempting. At the end, there would be either vengeance or the sword. Either way seems like a doorway to peace.

Sagira’s blaze of glory was her last gift to you. For a brief, fluttering moment, you feel her light on your face once more, her afterimage burned into your retinas and your mind. You have not turned your mind toward the implications of what she thought to save you for. That is more self-reflection than a fallen legend can stomach. But you know, with absolute certainty, that it was not for this, and she would be _incandescent_.

You step back, silent as the grave that surrounds you. And you choke down enough jagged pieces of your pride to call for help.

#

**II** **.**

Habit brings you to the Tower like a thief; after over a century in exile, a few days of being welcomed makes little difference. But it is not habit that sends you to a dark overhang in the bazaar. You have already told Zavala via radio what happened, and in a way it was so much easier to coldly enumerate your agonies to him, because while you and Zavala may be cordial, you are not friends. Zavala cares first about the mission. You are far down on his list of concerns.

Even then, it was almost unbearable to hear the empathy in the man’s voice. The pity for the lie of omission, because you could not bring yourself to speak the entire truth of Sagira’s death. Zavala heard in your fumbling words that she had been slain, and his imagination made it the strike of a Hive blade, her selfless deflection of the final death from you to herself. That is what you want to believe, as well. Better the image of you that lives in Zavala’s mind, the arrogant but competent guardian brought low by ill luck and circumstance.

But as you flew to the Tower in your far-too-silent ship, looking at the bags of candy corn at your feet that Sagira found so amusing and you accepted because it made the two people who meant the most to you happy, the small-d darkness of your soul knows that inescapable truth: you killed her. In arrogance, in anger, in your headlong rush. When so many times before you took her worried admonitions as the prayer that kept you safe, it is a low and dismal thought that all your arrogance has been a draught from the well of luck that has abruptly run dry.

That is why you retreat, like a wounded animal, to where you are present, but public enough that you can do nothing but keep your back stiff and your eyes dry. Where you cannot be accused of hiding, but you do not seek out the company of those who would wound you further with their concern.

Of course it is Ikora who breaches the walls of your pitiful, final defense first. She has always been unstoppable, your student. You welcome the idea of her anger, searing as a coronal flare, though if it would cleanse you to nothingness or rekindle the spark of your own rage and let you vanish in a final self-immolation is unclear. A dark whisper in the back of your mind, fading but still unforgettable, revels at the thought of the latter.

But you are unprepared for her grief.

You should have known that her grief would be a thing more dark and terrible than her anger, a knife blade more sure for all its subtlety.

“I heard what happened,” she says, her voice low and strained. Her dark eyes are wet with tears she has not quite shed. You wonder abstractly if this is the face she showed the day Cayde-6 died, when she counted the rolls of dead from the Red War and numbered friends and students among them. Guardians live long lives, and yet death lacks the courtesy of spacing its hammer blows out evenly along the length. “From Zavala. Osiris, are you…”

You taught her better than to ask foolish questions, and she stops herself before it quite passes her lips. “Of course not,” you say harshly. “To be shooed back to the Tower like an itinerant schoolboy.” The Guardian, the Crow, they had been implacable and your strength had, yet again, failed. “The Celebrant wanders free, and Sagira remains unavenged.”

The words hurt to say, even if you frame them as an affront to your dignity rather than an indictment of your failure.

But it has the desired effect. Ikora’s eyes do not dry, but her posture stiffens ever so slightly. The old rift between you two is a path easily and unwittingly tread by habit. “You are not the only guardian out there. Let others take up the burden while you recover.”

You cross your arms and huff, a common reaction in your vocabulary. “That isn’t necessary.”

It should annoy her further; your arrogance, whether justified or not, always has. But she looks at you—no, _into_ you—with narrowed eyes. “Stubbornness and luck brought back one thing you love, Osiris, and that makes you exponentially more fortunate than anyone else who has ever lived.” She meets your gaze, and you see in them the reluctance of a field surgeon wielding a white-hot knife, who does not want to cause agony but knows she has no choice. “The Infinite Forest is gone, and even if it weren’t… we both know that this is not something that can be fixed with brute force and timelines. Or Cayde would still be with us.”

“I know that. No one knows the Infinite Forest better than I do.” You would rather be angry at her explaining such childish principles to you than consider what she is truly trying to say.

But her pity says it all. “She’s gone, Osiris.” And her voice breaks.

Oh, how you wish you could break, with it. That is not a luxury you have ever allowed yourself, to fall weeping when all is hopeless. Through exile and loss and pain, you have always put one foot in front of another through sheer stubbornness, built into the circular logic that has sustained you through the years. If you live, you have not failed; if you have not failed, you live. Your own life is proof of your ability to solve all problems others thought were hopeless or impossible. Even your own student.

But in this moment, your words, at least, have failed. Ikora is a mirror showing grief that you cannot allow yourself to feel, or you will be brought to your knees. You reach out, and clasp her shoulder, and say the only words that can make it through the ache in your throat, as stupid as they are: “She was always proud of you.”

Ikora laughs, her shoulders shaking. She wipes her eyes. “You’re a fool,” she says.

They sound so alike that you have to turn away. “I have work to do. The Celebrant—” _The fight unfinished, the war un-won_.

“What you mean is that you want to be alone,” Ikora says.

“I already am alone,” you say harshly. “And I do not seek your help.”

Her coat rustles as she turns away. This seems so unlike your stubborn, brilliant student, to let you have the last word. Though as she leaves, she whispers, “Fool,” one more time.

That is more like it.

#

**III** **.**

You do not expect Ikora to give up so easily. The next logical move would be for her to send Saint after you, and you brace yourself for what will come next.

But he does not come, that afternoon. You should be glad, and you are in that same part of yourself that blazes in hateful self-immolation. For once, your request for solitude is being respected.

He also does not come in the evening.

 _Good_ , you tell yourself. You want to be alone. You almost believe it enough to not feel abandoned. You consider what Sagira might say, of such a childish mix of wanting and not wanting, and it is then you realize that you have existed for a solid ten minutes in which you were not thinking solely of her absence, and the pain of it hits exponentially harder.

You consider sleeping in your ship, as you have done many times in the past. Sagira will not be there, either, nattering about your attempts at poetry or teasing you about the messy state of the floor, as if she weren’t the one who always volunteered to take objects that amused her along for the ride.

There might still be an oblique thought in your mnd of escape back to the hunt, because after ten hours of _recovering_ as you have been ordered to do, you cannot think of anything you want less. What stops you is not the offered comfort of friendship that you heartily wish to escape, but that you cannot face sitting in the cockpit of your ship and having the silence of Sagira’s absence press into your ears.

A room in the Tower was offered to you, small and plain and bare, and that is where you go. It, too, is far too quiet. But there is a different quality to this silence; no engine hum, no faint hiss of air, no annoying creak from the armrest you keep intending to repair. This silence is woven of the faint sound of wind in the atmosphere, the countless tiny noises that drift in it from a city filled with living humans, the Tower itself creaking and settling as it cools into the night. It is a silence that does not require the electronic chatter and hum of Sagira’s movements, her faint sighs and snorts.

And you can believe, just long enough, as you rest your cheek on the too-soft pillow, that Sagira is not irreparably missing, but merely somewhere else.

#

**IV** **.**

You dream.

Perhaps it is this unaccustomed proximity to the Traveler, the great presence of it like a continent below an ocean, imperceptible until you have dived deep in sleep. Perhaps more so because the Traveler has sought to repair itself, shows wakefulness if not restfulness, and that energy chromatically colors the air you breathe. You have dreamed, of course, since leaving the city, but not with the vivid color and urgency of this, the coherency.

The former Speaker had always been curious about those dreams, and that had made you even more reluctant to share them at the time. Saint always saw portents in them, when he could coax them from you or read them into your attempts at poetry. You did not trust such dreams then, when they were an overly simple solution to complex problems that welcomed whatever interpretation the interpreter found most favorable. Your trust has always been in your waking perceptions, the depths you have plumbed with your own mind in deepest meditation.

You trust these dreams even less, now. Knowing what you know about the Traveler after countless lifetimes lived and relived in the Infinite Forest. The Forest could not simulate the Light, but the architecture of it showed an enemy’s understanding of the Traveler and its purpose. It is the eyes of the enemy that fully enumerate all flaws and weaknesses, after all. You know better than to trust the whispers that underpin the Vex network, let alone measure them for moral compass. But it has shown you enough to bring you a step closer to whatever full truth might exist, and it has only firmed your opinion that the contented and contorted faith of the former Speaker was more foolish than you even imagined at the time.

And yet, with all of your well-earned cynicism and wrath, you still dream.

You dream of a star, so brilliant that you cannot look at it straight on, which fills the sky of a garden of a world, like Mercury once was. You see a mote upon the surface of that star, one that changes and flickers through all possible colors and some impossible. Your dream self stands on an infinite wave-lapped beach, the water a brilliant green, the sand an unlikely, bloody red, the dunes tacked down by a riotous growth of grass and weeds. Above you, the mote dances across the surface of the star, growing steadily, though at the rate it moves, it will be some time before it can threaten that blinding light. The waves draw the sand away, revealing thin strands of purple ribbon that evaporate into blowing thread and slip through your fingers.

Your subconscious, you think grumpily as you drift to wakefulness, is neither particularly subtle nor creative. No wonder you’ve had such difficulty finding poetry again. And who will send your fumbling efforts to Saint now, when they will never be good enough to be finished?

#

**V** **.**

When you wake, you are not alone.

This does not startle you as it might, because when you know another being as well as you know Saint, your subconscious rests securely. He has taken possession of the bare room’s only chair, a thing of plain metal and light-colored plastic that is bowing slightly under his weight. He has his arms cross over his chest, one leg kicked out, head bowed toward his chest as he, too, dozes.

How long has it been since you have seen him without his helmet? It rests on the floor next to one of his feet, its once blinding surface buffed down to an almost velvety matte by countless scratches and dents. The rest of him is no less battered, but to you that is his natural state. You were all used goods when the Traveler, through the ghosts, brought you back into service.

As if he senses your regard, his eyes light back up and he raises his head. You know the shape of his smile, an open expression accentuated by the subtle shift of artificial musculature that lets a human mind read an exo face and find familiar expressions. He’s not angry.

You wish he was angry. This would be easier if he was angry.

You sit up on the thin mattress and wrap the blanket around your shoulders. While you’ve long been accustomed to sleeping in your armor—when you bother to sleep at all, when Sagira nagged you into it—some vestige of civilization had gotten you to take off your boots and divest yourself of anything that could tear the loaned fabric of the bedclothes. Courtesy, maybe. “I see you grew tired of waiting,” you say to Saint.

He stretches briefly, arms and legs reaching straight forward as he balances on the chair. “I have never been the patient one,” he says. “And even less patient when I hear of a friend in need.”

You make a face. “Then you’d better go help whoever it is.”

He doesn’t quite roll his eyes—that’s never really been his style—but you can still mentally feel him looking toward the heavens for just a bit more patience. When he fixes his eyes on you fully, you know there is no escape. Saint’s bluff exterior and unrelenting optimism have allowed the foolish to dismiss him at their peril. You did, once, until he cut to the heart of one of your secrets with equally unrelenting precision.

This is the true reason you have avoided him. Not self-flagellation, though that is no doubt part of it. But because you do not have the strength to hear that awful gentleness of his voice as he says, “You should tell me what truly happened.”

On any other topic, over any other wound, you would have fought like a cornered animal and thrown words like barbs at him unti he shrugged and went away with a, _When you are ready to talk, I will listen_.

But there will be no readiness on this topic, because it is a raw thing that will never cease to bleed. And you are already exhausted by the conflicting desire to bellow the truth into Ikora’s face so that she will stop trying to forgive you for what you know is unforgivable, the bone deep drag of wishing you could weep until everything you are has flowed out, and the childish want to beg for benediction as if that will undo the last few days.

And underneath those desires, the thought: _Fight, because there is nothing more. Or let this weakness consume you because you are nothing but prey_.

Finally, in the warm light of morning, in the presence of the person who knows you best in all the world, in the tower air that breathes with scintilla of Light, you are able to catch that thought and understand it as something… not wholly alien, but an infection that had feasted on what already existed. Something that must be cast out before it can grow further. Something Sagira would have—and did—rail against.

Saint stares at you. You don’t know how to explain this to him, nor do you want to, when you’re still uncertain what it means. You pluck at a small bit of fuzz on the blanket. “I don’t know where to begin.”

“At the beginning is usually best,” Saint says. When you do not speak, he rises only enough to drop to his knees in front of you. To reach up and take your face in his hands, gentle but as inexorable as the tide. You cannot look away. His fingers are warm, softened by some coating over the alloy that feels almost, but not quite, like skin. “Tell me of Sagira.”

It would be easier to breathe if he used those gentle hands to strangle you instead, even as you try to keep your recitation of fact dry. You do not know when you begin to weep, only that it hurts, and you can see nothing but the light of his eyes as you confess.

#

**VI** **.**

Later, you lay back down on the bed because you no longer have the strength of will to keep your back straight and sit. It has all drained away and left you empty, all the anger and self-recrimination and what-ifs. You have never felt so small and weak and old. Your cheek is pillowed against Saint’s thigh; not the most comfortable of rests, because even shielded by the blanket, it’s like resting your head on a rock. You do not care. Saint has moved to sit on the bed with you, his hand resting lightly on your neck.

You stare at the bare wall across from the two of you, because you lack also the strength to look at the grief on his face any longer. Exos can weep, after a fashion, but you do not look to see if there are tears. You’ve wept enough for the both of you already. Your head is full of everything but thought, your eyes and throat ache.

“This was useless,” you croak. “I don’t feel any better.”

“You will, some day,” Saint says. His thumb brushes slowly over the tender skin behind your ear. “But not today.”

You think of your visions of one future, an impossible time when this was to have been enough for you. But Sagira was there, and there is an emptiness in your heart that no amount of _enough_ can fill. “I have never had your optimism.”

“I know.” There’s a wry smile in Saint’s voice. “So I work twice as hard to see what is good, to compensate for you.” He lets you feel the full weight of his hand, like you are an unruly kitten who does not want her ears washed and he the mother cat. “You will say next that you must return to your hunt.”

He knows you too well. “I must,” you agree.

“No. You must leave that to the young guardians. They will not buy revenge with their lives, but they will succeed.” You know this tone of Saint’s voice, so determined that it is truth he speaks into the world, and the world will bend around it.

You squeeze your eyes shut. The old feeling wells up, that you cannot trust anyone to take on a task in your place. Because of course, no one can do a thing as well as yourself. Without this arrogant, mistrustful belief, would Sagira still be alive? You cannot even ask the Forest, and perhaps that is for the best. “And what would you have me do?”

“Have you not always lectured me that there are more ways to fight than running head-first into your enemy? I think you will remake yourself into an annoyance of such greatness that the Hive cannot imagine.” He moves his hand to your cheek, lightly wiping away the moisture that has begun to collect at the corner of your eye. You thought you were done with tears. “Your revenge will be to heal.”

#

**VII** **.**

You dream of birds swirling through a brilliant, amethyst sky, their shadows colliding and reshaping. You stand at the edge of a wind-blown cliff, the surf pounding at the rock beneath your feet.

Their song is a cacophony, sometimes merry, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes an angry chatter of warning.

Feathers drift down around you, barred in gold and emerald and sapphire. You hold out your hand and one wafts gently into your palm like a gift, its touch lighter than the kiss Saint presses to your temple when he thinks you are asleep.

The feather is unrelentingly white against the brown, lined skin of your palm, but shines like metal as you tilt your hand back and forth. It begins to smolder as you watch, and you curl your fingers around it, smoke squeezing out from your fist in thin trails.

 _Become a sword_ , you urge it. _Become my wings_. You wait for the familiar fire to fill you and lift you up.

When you uncurl your fingers, the feather remains, singed but whole. You give it to the wind, and only then does it ignite, blowing outward with the ferocity of a dying star. The fire swirls, spreads great wings, and shrieks the music of thunder through the air. It flies away without a backward glance, losing itself in the sphere of the sun.

Sparks bathe you like warm rain, like newly created elements carried on the stellar wind.

#

**VIII** **.**

The day you choose to leave your room is a sunny one. Workers bustle back and forth through the tower; you hear the sounds of children shrieking and Lord Shaxx bellowing some joyful command at them.

Life has not stopped for anyone but you. Saint has kept you apprised of progress of the hunt; he has brought you food, and one memorable time, shoved you into the room’s small cubicle shower because he claimed you stank so badly it would peel the paint from the wall. He does not natter at you like Sagira, but in his own way he has stepped into that role, of reminding you that you are human, whether you like it or not.

The day you go back out into the world is the day you realize that you do want to be human, for his sake if nothing else.

You return to the bazaar, to where Ikora keeps her vigil over the Traveler. You sit next to her and turn your face to the sun to feel its warmth.

“I was getting ready to send out a search party,” Ikora comments.

“I thought Saint was your search party,” you say.

She laughs, and her shoulder brushes lightly against yours. “He’s the one who sent me to you.”

“I hadn’t realized.”

“I know.” The silence that falls between you is companionable, and you close your eyes, cataloging the sounds of life that surround you. This is the first time in years, in decades that you’ve taken the time to simply absorb what exists around you. There is no urgent problem gnawing at your heels, at least not one you have it in your power to solve. You have little doubt at this point that, should you decide to ignore Saint and attempt to leave, this time he will stop you. Because this time, someone needs to.

That limit is almost comforting. Some days it will be something to rage against, when you need to rage. It already has been. But knowing there is still someone who will try to catch you if you fall lets you consider that some day, you will once again fly.

“There is a problem I think I could use your help with,” you finally say.

“Oh?” When was the last time she’s heard you say such a thing, if ever?

You describe to her the strange, dark whisper you have found in yourself. In the past week, even though it has been painful to do so, you have combed through every memory of your hunt for the celebrant, of the time of Sagira’s death, and what you have found concerns you. She listens intensely, her expression one you recognize. Ikora was your best and favorite student for a reason.

“Do you still hear this whisper?” she asks.

“Not so strongly, here. In the light of the Traveler, perhaps, or because I no longer have anything to fight. But it remains, and it comes if I call.”

“And you think it is _her_ ,” Ikora says.

It is a relief that she has come to the same conclusion as you. At times, you wondered if it was a grasping attempt to absolve yourself. But even if Xivu Arath whispers to you, she does not control you. She didn’t not make your poor decision in your place, only applauded as you did it. “And thus we have this resonance in our grasp,” you say.

“Let us make use of it, then.” She does not insult you by asking if you feel strong enough for such work. Her mind is already seven steps ahead, considering the best way to turn this knife of the mind back against itself.

#

**IX** **.**

“I know you have not eaten,” Saint says.

You do not feel enough yourself for food, though the scent of meat and spices he brings in with him somehow awakens your stomach. You look up from the diagrams that you and Ikora have been working on. You are close; the answer is within your grasp, but neither of you can quite see it. Frustrating, but not unexpected. The solution always seems impossible until it is found.

You have now ventured from the safe haven of the tower, though only to stand at the edges of the hunts that the Guardian and Crow are conducting in their own search for the Celebrant. The most useful knowledge has come from the Dreaming City, where the Wrathborn are of the Hive and not Fallen or Cabal. You have taken samples, listened to resonances, approached the Cryptoliths with caution and a shotgun at the ready.

It is easier to resist the lure of Xivu Arath’s bloody promises, now that you know what to listen for, know what she is doing. What she did to you, and now doubt so many other hapless victims. But the touch of it has left you sickened, has rekindled that all-consuming rage that you wish to unleash, because perhaps this time it will burn all things clean to ash.

Your fingers tremble around your pen. You drop it and squeeze them shut, into a useless fist. It is too late. Saint has already seen.

But he seems willing to play along, for now. He sets down a dish in front of you, several kofta kebabs. “They still let you at the grill?” you ask.

“They could not stop me if they wanted,” Saint says, with a dismissive snort. “But no. These are from a food stall. Run by a nice person named Muriel. I have not had time to practice cooking so often these days.”

To your surprise, the scent of this food, so close, breaks through the sick feeling in your gut, that twist of rage and sorrow that is a stone you cannot swallow. You pick up one skewer and take a bite; the hot juices on your tongue are redolent with cardamom and sumac. “You should ask Muriel to teach you their ways.”

Saint laughs. “I did not come here to be insulted by you.” He rests his hands on your shoulders, looking over the scattering of papers. “Your work goes well?”

“Well enough, if you ask Ikora.”

“I am asking you.”

You finish the skewer and tip the empty bit of bamboo back on the plate. “I am not accustomed to only having one of me working on a problem at a time.”

“It is difficult, to be only an ordinary immortal,” he jokes.

You bite back the urge to snap at him. That is not you; that is the thing you whose whispers you track. Instead, you take another bite of the meat. “The new guardian I told you of, Crow, has been assisting me.”

Saint pulls up a chair; the second day after you came to the Tower, he brought it with him. It’s sturdier than the one the room came furnished with, and it means you both can cram around the small table that serves as a desk. His knees brush against yours. When he folds his arms, his elbows rest on your notes.

For that moment, life feels almost normal again. “I have been thinking, about this Crow,” Saint says.

“Should I be worried?”

“It is I who am worried.” He rests his chin in one hand. “I do not like that you keep this secret from him.” Even Saint is cautious enough to not speak the secret out loud. The Tower isn’t known for being beset by spies, but the walls also have a tendency to grow ears in the form of nosey ghosts when there is gossip to be had.

“It is necessary for his safety.”

“He will find out. And if he does not hear it from one who cares for him, it will be much worse. You know this as well as I do. We are both old men who have seen such dramas too many times. So why do you hesitate?”

The glib answer is to repeat yourself. Or say that there is no time, because truly, there is little time for these sorts of conversations. You stand at the edge of a blade both vast and evil with Ikora, but if you can understand the making of it, you can give the guardians out there another weapon with which to fight. That is part, but not the whole of your hesitancy.

You have found yourself wishing to be far less glib, in these days. Sagira’s death has not slowed you, precisely, but it is an ever-present reminder of the weight of hasty words and decisions.

“There is barely room within me for my own pain,” is what you tell Saint. It must be the truth, or it wouldn’t hurt so much. “I have no place for his, not right now.”

Saint takes your writing hand in his, lightly curling your fingers. “That is an answer I cannot argue with. Though I would like to.”

“Would you take this burden?”

“I have thought about it, since you told me. I am not so good as you at separating my temper from my thoughts.”

If you were any good at that, Sagira would still be with you. But you understand the meaning beneath his words. Saint has never been practiced at letting go, driven as he is by the engine of such fierce, defiant belief in others. It’s half of why he was trapped in the Infinite Forest, pulled there because while you had cast off, he had refused to simply let you fade away. Some day, he will be able to let Cayde’s death go, because it is an immutable fact. But he needs more time for his grief, just as you do for yours.

“Then it will have to wait a little longer,” you say.

Saint sighs. “Some day we will be the wise old men we imagine ourselves to be.”

You look at Saint, one hand still wrapped lightly around yours, the other cradling his chin, the warm glow of his eyes, and wonder at the endless greatness of his heart.

#

**X** **.**

You dream of swords, night after night, and you find the literal nature of these dreams annoying in the extreme. But one night your dream-self examines these metaphors more closely to find the differences between them. Some, black as Darkness, emptiness sharpened and made manifest. Others curdle with dripping rot. Others are faceted like the stones of the dreaming city, their planes leading into an infinity you do not have time to explore.

In one, hidden within its crystalline depths, invisible but for a shear on the c-axis, is a garden, spreading out from the tarnished Tree of Silver Wings.

There is a shape to all these things, a structure that all pieces could easily be placed into. It isn’t a difficult puzzle to a mind like yours, though you find yourself sketching it out later once you are awake. You read in the lines of your drawing a fated pattern, the one obviously intended and inevitable. Blades repeating to eternity with trigonal symmetry; it’s certainly an efficient structuring.

But as you idly turn the sheet, you see other structures, other ways to treat these elemental pieces, even if the purpose of any one configuration is not readily apparent.

What you are being told is painfully obvious. You wish you had a more effective way to shout back into the unknowable that you do not care what designs are pre-set, what choices are arrayed before you.

Even presented with the inescapable inflection points of your life, those things that cannot be taken back or repaired, you will forge your own path. You imagine Saint calling you a _stubborn old man_ with such fondness in his voice that it will always take your breath away.

Always and forever.

#

**XI** **.**

You make one last visit to a Cryptolith on the Tangled Shore, this time with Ikora. Crow has cleared the area to the best of his ability, and Spider has… agreed to not interfere. In a tone that suggests he is doing you a favor that will cost you later, despite the fact that you are the ones risking your lives to rid his territory of such a dark and cancerous stain.

The air around the bulbous outgrowth is oily to sight and you feel it in the back of your throat when you breathe. Ikora allows herself a small expression of disgust before the two of you go to work.

With months of research, of hunts, this is the best solution you have come up with, miles of glass monofilament lines coiled into delicate meta circuits and melodic capacitors. Compared to the technology of the Infinite Forest, it is hopelessly clunky. Compared to the monstrosity of the Hive Cryptolith, it is laughably delicate.

Consulting your schematics, you and Ikora configure the lines, checking and re-checking. You will have only one chance at this; the Hive notice when something interferes with their song. You do not fear that they will send more enemies than you can handle; they will not dare push so far past their beach head on the shore. But to cut off the tendrils that will lead you back to Xivu Arath and allow you to read her weaknesses? It is good tactics to drop a weakened position, to regroup and attack from strength.

You and Ikora exchange nods. This may be the first project you have worked on together in many years, but the old rhythms are still there. By agreement, Ikora supplies the power to your constructed machine, channeling the Void in a slow trickle that builds harmony upon harmony. You still can wield the Light; there is still a spark within you, but neither of you know how much you might have left, if you can recover, and there has been no time to try to test such things. You adjust the singing, crystalline lines, searching out the perfect counter for that which you cannot quite hear.

With sudden weight, the voice of Xivu Arath crushes you to your knees. It echoes up through your bones, that whisper you have fought for weeks becoming a triumphant shout.

ONE LAST BATTLE, LIGHTBEARER.

The mud beneath your hands and knees steam as fire surges through you, that instinctive rage. She is not here, but she is, this monster that murdered your heart. But you hear in her joyous roar the truth—it is in the fighting of her that she gains the most strength. She is all war, the true conundrum. To fight her is to lend her power; to not fight her is to let her win. Hers is a gnarled tree that twists infinitely back onto itself, all branches leading to her inevitable victory.

Your first instinct is to burn the last of your Light into the harmony that you and Ikora have begun to create. It is the easy path of habit, to believe that none but you—and your sacrifice—can do what must be done. You push yourself to your feet, flame dripping from your shoulders in the ghost of great wings that were once yours.

“Osiris!” Ikora shouts.

You take a step toward the Cryptolith.

 _Osiris, you idiot_. It doesn’t matter if it is memory or the last shreds of Sagira’s spirit within you. Some day, you will learn to stop doing the same thing over and over and expect a different result.

Today will be that day.

You stop, swaying. You hold out a hand to Ikora. “I am needed to complete the harmony,” you say. “And you are needed to hold me.”

She takes your hand. Her Light is so bright; did you even realize how much when she was your student, or were you too blinded by your own brilliance?

With the ferocity of Ikora like a hurricane around you, Xivu Arath cannot bellow loudly enough to overwhelm you any longer. You find the connection between that whisper within you and the Cryptolith. Together, you unravel it, spin it into something new, find the celestial melody from which it was perverted and put it right.

The Cryptolith before you shrieks out its ineffectual protest. It begins to wither, fold in on itself. But its too late; you know its constituent parts, and in the knowing of something’s elemental being, you have the power to undo it again and again.

A deep cough wracks you, something sharp jabbing into your chest. Ikora’s grip shifts to hold you as you double over, coughing and coughing and fighting to breathe. With one last heave of effort, you find something solid caught on your tongue, and you spit it into your hand: a shard of tarnished silver.

#

**XII** **.**

You are still studying that shard of tarnished silver, which has remained stubbornly inert since the day it fell into your hand, when Ikora tells you that the Celebrant of Xivu Arath has been slain. It is merely one step in this ongoing war; Xivu Arath and Savathûn still wait in the dark.

You thank her, and she stays standing in the doorway of the workroom you have since acquired after your storm of papers and books became too great to be contained in your sleeping room, her hands clasped loosely behind her back.

“Are you glad?” she asks.

This is the completion of the vengeance you swore, the hunt that was taken from your hands by Crow and the younger guardians. It would be logical to reach past that, knowing what you know now about the whisperings of Xivu Arath and her role in your deadly mistake. Gladness feels like an inappropriate emotion for such an occasion, even if the blood of the Hive is never something to mourn. Grimly satisfied? At peace?

You have felt nothing for so long, now, the numbness in the wake of being wounded. You have always known that no amount of blood and destruction will bring back Sagira. But you had thought, perhaps even hoped, that it would bring back _something_.

Finally, you say, “I am tired.”

Ikora’s expression softens. “Then you should rest.”

That’s enough to ignite a spark of your old temper. You slap your hand lightly on the papers scattered across your desk. “I have done nothing but for months.”

“I think most would call this work,” she says. “Rest, Osiris. There will be more than enough problems to bend to your will—or cause—tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that.”

To rest, to stop, sounds appealing on its most shallow face. In the life of a guardian, this hunt has not been so long as that. But it has been your all-consuming purpose, and now that it is done, you can no longer see the path forward. This future is strange and new and you have entered it with no direction. The emptiness that you have filled with this temporary purpose yawns again, and you no longer know what to offer it. You cannot be as you were, because you no longer are who you were when you were Osiris and Sagira. You are only yourself.

You leave your workroom behind and go to the roof of the Tower, where the wind blows fiercely, its chill cut only by the intensity of the sun. There, you sit, looking up at the healed face of the Traveler.

You have long ago learned that faith in the Traveler is misplaced, that it has its own purpose that is not necessarily that of humanity. That it is not a god, not a friend, perhaps not even an ally. Perhaps that was why you turned so inward, convinced that there was no help coming; there was only you. Your mistake then had been your certainty that none could carry all of the burdens so well as you, when it was never just _you_. You have never been alone, until now.

You close your eyes, your face tilted to the sunlight, and you search out that spark of Light within yourself that Sagira so loved. It is not gone, but it pales, guttering without her presence. And you reach out to the Traveler, searching for the familiar Light that was her, because she was part of it. Because the oldest laws of the universe still claim that energy can be neither created nor destroyed, only transmuted.

#

**XIII** **.**

You dream of the old Speaker, in the days before he exiled you, before you were enemies. When he’d thought he could teach you to follow his path instead of forging your own.

The space of his office, whole and remade once more, echoes with the litany he pressed upon you like a prayer: _The Traveler is good. The Traveler is sentient. The Traveler will save us. The Traveler will leave us._ The Speaker himself stands on his balcony, resting his hands on the railing, looking out over the city. He does not see you.

Why think of this now? How many years have you spent, deconstructing everything he once told you?

“You were wrong,” you say. He does not move, does not look. You take the filigreed metal staircase up toward him, speaking with each step. “About everything. The Traveler has its own purposes and goals, good only where they overlap with our survival. The Traveler is not sentient in the same way as us. We have always been called upon to save ourselves, for good or ill.” You do not shout, but the anger of each word tears at your throat.

Only then does he turn toward you. When he speaks, his voice is as you remember it, but hollow, as if from a great distance. “And the last?” he asks.

You wrap your hand around the cool metal of the railing. “It is too late for it to flee now.”

The Speaker gives a small nod and collapses in on himself, turning to ash that flows away like water. Only his mask remains, laying on the tile floor. “I _was_ wrong,” his voice whispers. “The Traveler will not leave us, because we are as much its last hope as it is ours.”

You look into the empty eyes of the Speaker’s mask. In the depths of the sky outside, a star blooms into being, bright as Sagira’s fire.

#

**XIV** **.**

You blink away this waking-dream to find the afternoon has gone cool around you, the sun sinking below the wall of the City. You look up at the Traveler with narrowed eyes. “No,” you say. “I don’t trust you.”

||Speak, listen, and trust is built like the city.||

“No,” you say again, into the wind.

You make your way down off the Tower, the slow and normal path of stairs. You no longer have to catch yourself when it comes to jumping from ledges; the reminder that you have only one life left is ingrained now, bittersweet rather than the active ache.

With each step, you think of the broken Speaker’s mask that still resides in Zavala’s office. The thought is refreshingly infuriating, the closest you’ve felt to your old self in the year since Sagira’s death. The most infuriating thought of all is that it _is_ an interesting problem to solve, and there is no one to stop you from pursuing it in your own way.

Your new rooms are further from the Tower, because you needed something larger. The scent of cooking tajine drifts through the hall. The door swings open at your touch to show you Saint inspecting the contents of a clay pot. He has been threatening lately that he will destroy the kitchen with something that requires ‘greater technique’ than simply grilling skewers.

“Ah, there you are. I’d begun to wonder if you’d flown off,” Saint says.

“Not today.” You join him in the tiny kitchen to peer into the pot. Some kind of meat stew, lamb if your nose has the right of it. “It smells good,” you admit.

“I would have been sorry to eat this alone.”

Your joke about him wanting a companion in death—and it’s definitely a joke, because the food looks perfect, but it’s your role to tease him about these things—never leaves your lips as he wraps his arms around you, drawing you close. You rest your cheek against his chest, listening to the soft hum that is like a heartbeat for exos, feeling the warmth of his Light like the afternoon sun gently bathing your face—and feeling that Light echo within yourself. You slip your arms around his waist.

Some feelings are too powerful for words, some healings too painful to describe. To find this state of grace is a perfect paradox, as simple as opening a door, as impossible as a centuries-long path through loss, led by a thin and fragile thread. You close your eyes as he rests one hand lightly on the back of his neck, his thumb making a slow, warm path.

And it is enough.


End file.
